SMAC: New Paradigm For Security Professionals

Data Security Council of India (DSCI) announced that its 6th DSCI Best Practices Meet (BPM) will be held on July 9-10, 2014 at, The Leela Palace, Bangalore. DSCI organizes  the BPM, annually, to bring together senior information security and privacy professionals, business leaders and government officials to deliberate on latest developments, existing and contemporary issues in security and privacy  and emerging cybersecurity trends.  The theme for this year’s meet is ‘SMAC: new paradigm for Security?’

The convergence between Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud or collectively referred to as SMAC are the reason for the new age information explosion. Organizations, both large and SME’s, across sectors such as IT, BFSI, Telecom, Healthcare, e-commerce are investing heavily in these technologies and leveraging the proliferation of the internet by launching new-age enterprise capabilities, for their business growth and to gain competitive advantage. 

Government departments are also increasingly adopting technologies in the SMAC stack for increasing the efficiency of their e-Governance projects and to aid policy and decision making. The growing adoption of these technologies along with the collaborative and cumulative effect of all of these technologies working in unison essentially magnifies the efforts of the organizations that are able to wield them effectively. This evolution is challenging the ability of existing security paradigms and current security capabilities to address business critical risks. 

The data explosion on mobile devices, application on cloud environment, big data and advance analytics and social media are leading to heterogeneous security and privacy concerns for enterprises. Hence, enterprises are scouting for new techniques and demanding high data protection standards, which may help retain their customers’ loyalty and trust.

DSCI, through its various programs, engagements and events, focusses on Public Advocacy, Thought Leadership, Outreach and Awareness, in addition to capacity building. DSCI engages with the government and the industry to help aid policy making, conduct studies and surveys reports, develop frameworks, organize capacity building programs and organise events focussed on specific yet diverse challenges facing the Indian Industry. For this work DSCI engages all stakeholders to interact and deliberate for establishing a strong data protection regime in India.

The previous BPM, held in Chennai, witnessed participation from over 200 senior level professionals from industries including IT-BPM, BFSI, telecom, healthcare  and government entities, along with distinguished speakers in panel discussions. This year, The 6th DSCI Best Practices Meet will focus on the theme “SMAC – new paradigm for security” and create opportunity to interact with the leaders in security and privacy, to understand and learn the contemporary practices which are evolving to address specific challenges and threats. The meet will witness over 300 industry professionals, 40+ speakers, 20+ sessions, multiple parallel track discussions, breakfast meets and multiple keynote addresses. Some of the important topics include SMAC Adoption, Big Data, Internet of Things & Everything, Standards & Frameworks of SMAC, Privacy Social Computing, Mobility, Cloud Forensics, Bitcoins and Virtual Currency and more.

For the first time, the BPM is spread over two days, during which workshops and roundtables around specific themes such as IT Act and Amendments, Data Localization and Advanced Persistent Threats will be held to promote security approaches and solutions. Commenting on the importance of BPM, Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI said “DSCI Best Practices Meet, as an annual event, focuses on the threat landscape, security solutions to counter and mitigate risks that an organization faces. 

This year’s meet will bring the security and privacy approaches and best practices that have not been shared with the industry so far; specifically to meet the challenges that have emerged with the evolution and convergence of social, mobility, analytics and clod computing. It will specifically focus on discussing the implication of SMAC stack adoption on businesses and its security and privacy impediments.” He further added “this year BPM aims at engaging the security community and other stakeholders - user organizations, service providers and policy makers to focus on trends, issues and challenges in order to evolve best practices to deal with the same.”